We are proud to tell that we’ve reached a new milestone in the development of bringing the Sailfish OS experience to Android devices. The product will be officially called the ‘Jolla Launcher’, and our invitation based Alpha phase testing will start next week.

Initially, the Jolla Launcher is designed to give Android device owners the opportunity to try out the smooth Sailfish OS experience in a simple and risk-free way. As a launcher, it is designed to work on top of your Android OS, providing you the effortless gesture-based swipe user interface and highlights of the essential tools that make Sailfish OS stand out from the competition.

The Alpha testing phase is targeted mainly for Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 devices. The Jolla Launcher Alpha can also be installed on many other devices running Android 4.3 or later.

We are now calling our community members to sign up for the Alpha testing group. If you’re interested to join, this is what you should do:

Include the following information: your name, and which device(s) your using

Wait to receive the Google Play installation link and further instructions

Note that your email address is only used for the purposes of i) registering you to the Community Alpha, ii) keeping you informed of the progress of the testing. We will remove the email address from our database after the end of the Community Alpha.

Please do this no later than June 27, 2014.

Requirements for signing up:

You have a Nexus 4 (or 5) device, or some other device which runs Android 4.3 or later

Jolla Launcher is planned to go to the next phase after some thorough testing and possible tweaking, after which we will launch it to wider audiences. Stay tuned for further announcements!

Update on 24th of june:
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The interest towards Jolla launcher Community Alpha testing has been much higher than we anticipated, and the number of people that signed up have exceeded by far the number of alpha testers that we can handle now. We thank you for the great interest, and we will start to enable download links to first few hundred alpha testers tomorrow.

As the demand was so much higher than what we can sufficiently handle now, we have decided the following:

We will continue with Beta testing on August, and all the people that have been signed up so far will be able to join at Beta testing phase.

Registration will be open until 27th of June like we said, but in practice you can now register yourself for Beta testing phase that starts on August.

We are sorry for the inconvenience for those that can not fit in now, but our aim is to deliver the Launcher to all of you as fast as we can with the current resources that we have.

Comments

1

Still it would be nice to have the possibility to install the launcher on a tablet to check out how it performs on bigger screens. Plus I am using a non tablet optimized launcher (aviate) on my nexus 7.

Dear Jolla Team,
I was sign up on 20th June for testing Jolla launcher alpha. I didnt received any invitation E-mail until now. Was i to late with my sign up to test alpha version? Sorry for my bad english!